🏆 Overdue Task challenge

Hi Community,

:key: The clarity in Asana is key. It comes from many places: clear task title, assignee and due date on each task, well-defined project workflows… but first and foremost: overdue tasks! Or rather the lack of it. But it is hard to reach the holy grail, so let’s work on it together!

:muscle: Let’s all (virtually) work on our overdue tasks together during a single day. The goal: no more overdue tasks by the end of the day!

:gift: :gift: :gift: We have prizes from Asana (personalized boxes) for:

  • the person who shares their best strategy to deal with overdue tasks
  • the person who tells the best story about how went their challenge day
  • a random soul picked from all participants!

:video_camera: Here’s a video to explain the challenge, including strategies on how to clean overdue tasks.

Results of the 2021 edition → 🏆 Overdue Task challenge - #10

24 Likes

In the video, you’ll see my 8 tips to get rid of overdue tasks:

:calendar: Change due date

:scissors: Split

:pencil2: Reconsider the goal

:red_car: Move to a parking project

:link: Use dependencies

:handshake: Delegate

:x: Cancel

:white_check_mark: Do

Did I miss anything?

7 Likes

Great initiative, @Bastien_Siebman! Looking forward to reading all tips you will share and see who were the winners :tada:

trophy_320

3 Likes

This will be fabulous; I have encouraged my leadership team to join us!
DAB

2 Likes

Our team just decided to do this also on friday.

1 Like

Great, can’t wait to get feedbacks!

2 Likes

HealthMeans.com will be participating!

1 Like

Today is the day! Here’s what The Economist should have shown today!

12 Likes

Thanks to everyone who participated! I’ll share below some of the best answers, but more importantly, here are the winners!

:trophy: Best story: @Tim_Jager with his lamp story :rofl:
:trophy: Best strategy: @Andrea_Mayer with her detailed and thorough strategy!
:trophy: Random pick: @Barbara_Ramirez

See you next year for another challenge :wave: the best story and strategy will be shared soon!


:star2: Best strategies on dealing with overdue tasks :star2:
from the submissions

from Kate

  • To complete them
  • answer what I could and then reassign to someone who has the rest of the answers
  • make a note as to how far the task was, then adjust the due date if waiting on a client or external person to provide some information

from Andrea Mayer

from Barbara
Since I’m an Asana consultant & implementor, I’m in more than 15 different organizations in Asana (18 to be exact, so imagine that!!, -thank you Zapier to be my time saver-), so a while ago I have decided to go deeper into some development tasks -that are not my area of expertise at all-, and I created a task for me that it was breakdown into small tasks, but I was still facing challenges with getting them complete, so today (because after reading more about this challenge I was encourage to taking delegation decisions) I decided to go into UpWork and hire a freelancer/developer to delegate this task to!!!

from Sofia
I have a weekly recurring task to review all my tasks, usually on Friday when I have more time. I visit “My Tasks” view and filter tasks according to the due date. I review all overdue tasks and also any upcoming tasks. Because I do it consistently, I never have too many overdue tasks. My strategy is to make sure that they are in the priority project I set up for myself (Bastian’s productivity hack) and, once I can see them in the context of all my tasks, I give them a more realistic due date or decide if they are even worth doing. Another option is to delegate them.


:star2: Best stories on dealing with overdue tasks that day :star2:
from the submissions

from Kate
I had 16 overdue or due tasks at the start of the day, and I got it down to only 5 overdue tasks. None of the remaining overdue tasks are urgent. And the challenge encouraged me to get back to my task list over and over. To make some decisions on things that I was letting just sit undone. It really pushed me to be more productive in my work and let me head into the weekend not feeling like I needed to “catch up”. My anxiety is considerably lower at the end of the day.

Finishing up these tasks also allowed me to collaborate more with some of my colleagues - who are all across the world!

from Barbara*
I usually take a few minutes to go over my daily tasks (with dates already defined) at the end of my day… But obviously we will always face challenges and last minute meetings, and today was one of those days where even when I have set my calendar to be OOVO (of of my virtual office, because I work from home), I received 2 requests for last minute meetings (which I don’t like to because I have a process I follow before every meeting, and my Google calendar obviosly rejected them (thanks to the OOO feature), but since I have an integration with my Asana (thanks to Zapier) I received a task to “prepare” for these meetings, my mind was “What the …!?”, so I open up my laptop, and then just decided ok I’ll doit (just with less than 30-min to do so), and it turned out to be great meetings, I didn’t feel prepare and that stressed me out at the begining, but thankfully they flow so smoothly, it made me realize that sometimes is ok to things not going as we planned to (I’m a person that my MO is to gather all the facts before jumping into any conversation, so is hard for me to have small talks sometimes -working on getting better at it-), so I think this was a good way to end my week and I’m so happy about it…

from Sofia
I’m leaving the organisation soon (in 2 weeks), so it was super useful to do one final clearout so that my boss won’t have to deal with my overdue tasks haha. I think she’ll appreciate it! This exercise gave me a peace of mind that I’ve done everything I could to help my team through the transition period. I also thought of additional procedures I should document before I leave. Win-win!

from tim
We all are aligned that without asana we would never ever have made it so far! We do use asana as really the tool to get work done and collaborate.
But still sometimes something falls under the cracks :joy: as a task from our first office move - to do at 31 Aug, 2018 - we still wonder if the lamp was ever ordered.

6 Likes

Congratulations to all the winners! :tada: :clap:t4:

1 Like

Wow, thank you again for organizing this contest @Bastien_Siebman
Delighted to be one of the winners :grinning:

Congrats also to @Tim_Jager and @Barbara_Ramirez!

Bastien asked me to also share my strategy with all of you directly so here you go: ⏰ Strategy on how to deal with overdue tasks

2 Likes

Andrea’s post has been added!

1 Like

Uhhh :grin::tada::balloon: what an honor!!

Thank you so much

2 Likes

Yeti_riding_unicorn_320